“Do you notice it? The air feels stagnant. The everyday people are holding their breath, anxiously watching as their neighbors’ doors are busted down.” When Captain Han Pritchard questions the affluent and privileged Toran Mallow (played by Cody Fern) and his “wife” Bayta (Synnove Karlsen), it’s clear he knows what they’ll say. Their wealth insulates them, making them too ignorant and comfortable to hear the marching boots. Even when the Black Tongue, the flagship of the telepathic pirate warlord known as the Mule, looms over their honeymoon location, their main concern is not getting shaded from the sun. They’re too self-absorbed to let something as trivial as a coup disrupt their leisurely life.

Not to sound like a broken record in these reviews, but boy, does that feel familiar!

In the same manner that its narrative unfolds in the twin shadows of the anticipated Third Crisis and the unexpected emergence of the godlike “mentallic” ruler, the Mule, Foundation Season 3 is set against the backdrop of the potential disintegration of American democracy into unchecked, exploitative authoritarianism. Unpredictable events happen! However, this context enriches the show’s depiction of two competing forms of imperial fervor—the Mule’s joyous cruelty and the Empire’s lavish appetite to indulge whims before disaster strikes. The Trump era, after all, rapidly enacted both the ascent and demise of an authoritarian regime, so it is fitting that this series captures both extremes as well.

The world’s most crucial defenders are the scientists Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick, the pioneer of psychohistory and his most gifted (and psychic) disciple. Awakened from cryosleep for several weeks annually by their followers, their mission is to steer the Second Foundation. This clandestine cult-turned-spy network of mentallics uses telepathy to subtly guide the galaxy, ensuring history unfolds according to Seldon’s Plan. With time pressing upon them, Hari chooses to remain awake to lead the Second Foundation, while Gaal stays in stasis. Her task, he insists, is to directly confront and overcome the Mule, making her preservation more vital than his own.

When Gaal is finally awoken, she encounters not Thalis (Sandra Guldberg Kampp), the priestess-type leader of Second Foundation during all her reawakenings so far, but by the Second Foundation’s current head, a deaf man named Preem (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur). She learns that it’s been many years since her last wake-up, and that Hari’s an old man now. In his desperation to help civilization’s dual threats, he stayed awake for decades, staying up and running to guide the Second Foundation so that Gaal would be more vital when the showdown with the Mule she’s foreseen in her dreams finally comes to pass. 

Hari, however, is concealing his next move. With the help of the mysterious entity that restored his digital mind to his physical body, which takes the form of his wife Kalle (Rowena King), he steps through some kind of miraculous, instantaneous warp zone in the fabric of spacetime, to parts unknown.

But even robbed of Hari, Gaal has an unlikely new ally in her struggle, as we learn in the episode’s final scene. I’m not sure how or when, but at some point she opened a line of communication with Empire himself, Brother Dawn, about to be ascended to the status of Brother Day and official Cleonic power. Like her, he’s fixated on the problem of the Mule, as is his robotic advisor Demerzel. Maybe if they pool their minds and their resources, they can take the psychopathic telepath (telepathic psychopath?) down.

Nothing we learn about the Mule is pretty. In a bravura scene of supervillainy, our mutant monarch makes himself at home in the former residence of Archduke Bellasario and his daughter-heir, Scurlet (Isla Gie). (The tailoring and interior design could not be more Dune-coded if Kyle MacLachlan and/or Timothée Chalamet showed up themselves.) Psychically forcing a servant to psychically force the kid to nearly kill herself, he demonstrates how  he can control huge numbers of people indirectly by controlling only a handful with his powers directly. Against a brutalist backdrop of stone and portraiture, actor Pilou Asbæk chews the scenery like it’s his last meal, and the juxtaposition is a delight.

Back on the imperial capital, Trantor, the Cleons each pursue their own agendas. Dawn has his secret connection to Gaal to safeguard, his concerns about the Mule to advance, and his ascendency to the position of Day, the forward face of Empire, in a matter of days.

Normally, this would mean Brother Dusk would walk, or be shoved, to his death by disintegration according to a schedule set out generations earlier, by a Brother Day who’d taken note of his line’s increasingly early cognitive decline. But Dusk, whether honestly or out of self-interest or both, believes these times aren’t normal. With the Prime Radiant itself showing the future severed off like a beheaded serpent, surely a leader with his expertise shouldn’t be consigned to oblivion in a week and a half.

Right, Demerzel? Well, no. In a quietly terrifying way, she tells him she’s a walking clock that ticks out the lifespan of each Cleon, and she never runs late.

Right, Day? No again. The dissolute, perpetually shirtless nominal leader of the galaxy believes in nossing, Lebowski, nossing. Carving himself open with a knife, he grins and bears it as nanites repair the wound. This reveals that the Cleons have gone from forcefield-enabled Superman-style invulnerability (as they’d had during Season 1) to a much more painful Wolverine-style “healing factor,” a nifty embodiment of how the mighty have fallen.

The self-mutilating Day thinks he and all his brothers throughout time are just “rag dolls.” He tells Dusk he won’t intervene on another misfit toy’s behalf, especially not with the end of their line staring them in their face in a matter of months thanks to the Mule. He would rather gamble his time away with a soldier buddy (Ibraheem Toure) who seems like the one person who both a) understands him and b) isn’t also simultaneously his girlfriend and his concubine and his drug dealer. 

Right, Dawn? Well, here Dusk might get somewhere. Normally, enrobing the new Day would fall to the previous one, but since that bearded son of a bitch is playing hooky, Dusk steps in to fulfill his role in the ritual.

Dusk also taken it upon himself to create maybe the most horrifying thing we’ve seen on this show so far. He’s commissioned a black hole bomb, which is as scary as it sounds. Presided over by a man with the dress and diction of an Andor ISB officer and the vocabulary of a deranged poet (Fisayo Akinade), this godforsaken orbital weapon is capable of imploding planets in seconds from across the void of space. Dusk’s hope is twofold: that Dawn can use it against the Mule, who concerns Dusk as much as he concerns anyone else, and that Dawn will extend Dusk’s lease on life as a result.

While I led this review with the heaviest stuff, god forbid I give the impression that Foundation is a downer to view. I mean, in the abstract, fall-of-civilization, just-trying-to-mitigate-the-destruction sense, yeah, sure. But as a viewing experience? Oh no no no no! It’s all dazzling cityscapes, sumptuous interiors, costuming that makes you laugh at its audacity. (Demerzel’s tearaway chest panel!) It’s the way the script by Leigh Dana Jackson and Caitlin Parrish leans into the cartoon heroism of Pritchard (his first name is Han and he’s a captain, for chrissakes!), or the overheated, nearly erotic praise of the black-hole powered “Beast” squirted all over the thing by its captain, or Cassian Bilton’s hilarious Lee Pace impression as the verge-of-Day Dawn, or the Mule’s grinning, screaming eeeeeevil. 

But there we go again, right back to the start. Haven’t we learned by now that no evil is too cartoonish for people intent on doing evil to embrace?

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.